Give Us This Day Tomorrow's Bread

Notes from class

This week, I’m attending my final seminary class, taught by Matthew Bates. We’re tracing the travel narrative in Luke—Jesus’ long, meandering trip to Jerusalem in Luke 9:51–19:44. (And y’all, it’s my favorite class I’ve taken in seminary. It’s just so good!)

Also, I graduated on Saturday! (So … hopefully I pass this class.)

Since I’m in class for eight hours a day this week, I don’t have a full-length post for you. But I wanted to bring you a mini-post based on class notes—and make an announcement about something new I’m adding on Substack!

Daily Bread

You’re probably familiar with the Lord’s Prayer (or the Our Father). It’s the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples, used liturgically in Christian worship from the earliest days of the Church. Let’s focus on two lines of the prayer (Luke 11:3-4, NRSVUE):

Give us each day our daily bread.
And forgive us our sins,
for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.

Photo by mohamed hassouna on Unsplash

“Daily bread” evokes God’s provision of bread in the wilderness in ancient days, when honey-tinged manna fell from heaven (Exodus 16). But! There’s a potential translation issue here. This line likely should be translated as: “Give us today our bread for tomorrow.”¹

Tomorrow’s bread, not today’s.

But … doesn’t that mess up the reference to manna in the wilderness? God gave a rule: the Israelites gathered only the manna that they would eat that day—maggots infested the leftovers. In this way, the people practiced trust in God’s ongoing provision.

Well, the answer is found in the exception to the rule. On Fridays, the Israelites gathered two days’ worth of food so that they could rest on Sabbath and still eat their fill.

Paul Sloan draws a connection to the Jubilee year described in Leviticus 25. In that text, God promises to provide extra crop in the sixth year so that the Israelites can refrain from planting in the seventh, letting the land rest.² After seven of these seven-year cycles, the people were to observe a year of Jubilee, forgiving all debts and returning land that had been sold off, so that generational poverty could never grow roots in the land.

We don’t have evidence that Israel ever observed Jubilee in a widespread fashion, but its inclusion in the Law speaks to the heart of God.

In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus teaches us to pray that God would give us our bread for tomorrow and that he would forgive our sins as we forgive the debts of others. Sounds like Jubilee!

What would it mean to let this aspect of the Lord’s Prayer shape how we pray and how we practice?

Announcement: We Have a Group Chat!

For a few weeks, I’ve been thinking of taking advantage of Substack’s subscriber-only chat feature, and I’ve decided to open up a chat for my paid subscribers.

As my list of paid subscribers has grown, I’ve found that many of you have big, important questions on similar themes. I think it’s valuable to have a place to wrestle with those questions in a semi-private community rather than on the truly open internet. And looking down the road, as our community continues to grow—and especially once I start my next degree program in August—individual DM exchanges are going to become less and less sustainable.

So, if you’re joining us there, bring your questions, your ideas, your interesting textual connections. Let’s walk and wrestle with God together.

For everyone else, we’ll continue having these conversations in the comments section—and I’m looking forward to it! Let’s learn from each other, in community.

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If you’d like to participate in the work I’m doing, here are the links!

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ICYMI

1. Paul T. Sloan, Jesus and the Law of Moses: The Gospels and the Restoration of Israel within First-Century Judaism, (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2025), 99.

2. Sloan, Jesus and the Law of Moses, 99.